I don’t know about those who watched the Olympics in non-battleground states, but here in Virginia, I saw a constant loop of commercials that fit into a very tight range of categories:

1) Coca-cola’s valorization of China – It is a big market that likes red things, and we don’t want them turning to Pepsi.

2) Budweiser – Every time the Dalmatian gives the Clydesdale a fist bump my two-year-old screams with delight and dances around the room.

3) Erectile dysfunction products – Evidently, nothing makes middle-aged men want to feel young and vital again more than re-kindling the lost dreams of athletic glory. Viva Viagra!

4) Presidential Candidates. John McCain and Barack Obama are going at it like it’s October here. I think that the fact that McCain runs ads that intone “We are worse off than we were four years ago” is still amazing to me, but with a “wrong track” number near 80%, it would be foolish to open with, “Let the good times keep rolling.”

However, what I am really interested in is the connection between (3) and (4) – I want someone to start asking the presidential candidates about IMPOTENCE. I don’t care about whether or not they need Viagra, or Cyalis, or Extenze, or even how many bedrooms they may have in their house(s). I want to know how they plan to deal with America’s impotence.

For the last eight years, we have been entranced by a narrative of infinite virility. We can, we are told, do anything we set our mind to. If an enemy defies us, we can attack them. If they fight back, we have a surge capable of controlling every force within their power. Not to overplay the sexual imagery, but the promise that our targets will submit to our advances if we only have the courage to be bold and forward has been repeated so often that it has become heresy to even question it.

But the last three weeks should confirm that our pretensions to infinite vigor and overwhelming force have been far less real than we hoped. Both Russia and China have confirmed that there is little we can do to contain their power. In Georgia, Russia continues to flout all our warnings that they must leave the sovereign boundaries of a country that we were recently intent on bringing into NATO. We should be relieved that we had not done so yet because if Georgia were in NATO, Russia would have attacked anyway, and we would have looked that much more helpless when we had no viable way to come to their defense.

On the other side of Asia, China has flouted every norm of liberalism that we thought they had promised to uphold in exchange for the Olympics, and we had no answer other than to gush over how efficiently the whole system works. They conclusively demonstrated that they could play all the games that interest American corporations and American consumers and still maintain a repressive political system. The contradiction that we thoroughly expected would undo them appears to be no contradiction at all, and we have no plan B for encouraging changes that they have no intention of making.

All of this is to say that the last President spent eight years vocally proclaiming that there was no limit to the potential transformation that American power and preeminence could bring to the world, and now the next President is likely to spend four (or eight) years trying to explain why we can’t change some things and how we must learn to live with or mitigate evils beyond our correction.

John McCain’s forceful denunciations of Russia’s invasion of Georgia did make Barack Obama’s slow, low-key, and calibrated call for restraint look somewhat weak and indecisive, and Obama quickly felt the need to ratchet up his rhetoric. However, neither has offered any clear and credible way to deter Russian designs on Georgia. McCain’s stated willingness to suspend Russia’s access to the G8 channels does not appear to scare the Russians nearly so much as it scares our European allies who are closer to the action and decisively dependent on Russian oil reserves. Does it make any sense at all to speak so strongly when carrying no stick?

Whoever the next President is, he will probably face an ongoing crisis in Georgia, a long-term question about how to deal with an immensely powerful China, and numerous other cases from Iran to Malaysia and North Korea in which our options are decisively limited. I, for one, would respect a President willing to say, “Yes, that is a very bad situation, but there is only so much we can do about it.” Neither Obama nor McCain seem very inclined to give that answer, but it is time that we admit that there are many national and international arenas (far from the bedroom) in which impotence is one of America’s most thorny problems.